LuisTeodoro.com

If truth is the first casualty in war, noncombatants must be a close second.

Here in the archipelago of our despair, 40,000 people have fled their homes in Pikit, Cotabato, since last week, when the Armed Forces attacked a supposed Moro Islamic Liberation Front camp in that town.
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War has once more broken out in Mindanao, and it has been greeted with fear, apprehension and puzzlement.

Part of the puzzle is whether Mrs. Arroyo is still commander in chief, and why, despite her announced policy of holding peace talks with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), the military persists in undermining that policy, this time through an offensive that from all appearances could have been avoided.
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In politics as well as personal and social relations, the enemy of one’s enemy can be one’s friend. One’s enemy, however, can also be one’s friend, albeit temporarily, if both of you have a bigger and more threatening enemy to confront.

A neighborhood bully who makes it a habit to fire his gun into the air to frighten everyone, for example, can unite even the bitterest of enemies against him. It is the third party that’s often crucial to the making of temporary alliances between enemies, and not only in a neighborhood. It happens as well in politics, and even in the relations between antagonistic forces within nations as well as between nations that in other circumstances would be at each other’s throats.
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Apparently unable to defend its obvious, blatant, pathetic, dangerous and possibly treasonous support for the imminent U.S. war on Iraq, the Arroyo administration now claims that it’s “really” for peace.

The “really” is important, in that no one in his right mind who has been listening to what they’ve been saying—and noting what they’ve been doing—can ever conclude that Mrs. Arroyo and her leading defense, security and foreign affairs officials are for a peaceful solution to the Iraqi crisis, which is what being “for peace” should mean.
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Almost immediately after the globally televised speech of US Secretary of State Colin L. Powell before the United Nations on February 5 (February 6 in Manila), President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo announced that the Powell speech had convinced her that Iraq is indeed hiding weapons of mass destruction and has links with the terrorist network al-Qaeda.

If Mrs. Arroyo was indeed thus convinced, it was a case of the faithful’s being converted. It was also a case of relying on someone (Powell) whose presentation was based on several unsubstantiated assertions—and quite a few lies.
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The U.S. war on Iraq will have at least unforeseen consequences. There are predictions, however, that the world will witness an oil crisis the likes of which it has not seen before should the United States launch its war of aggression against that small, weak and already devastated country.

A period of instability in the entire Middle East has also been predicted, even if the United States succeeds in quickly ousting Saddam Hussein. A wave of terrorist attacks against the United States Britain, and whatever other countries that join the “coalition” that George W. Bush has cobbled together could follow the instant the U.S. starts hostilities.
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Interviewed recently on his views on the impending US war on Iraq, Frank T. Griswold, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States, had occasion to observe that “[Americans] are loathed, and I think the world has every right to loathe us.”

“[The people of other countries] see us as greedy, self-interested and almost totally unconcerned about poverty, disease and suffering,” Griswold continued.
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